Care Engagement: What Works

Care Engagement: What Works

Obstacles to care are wide-ranging and PLWHA are a diverse group of clients. Thus, best practices in care engagement might best be seen as a menu of options—a very long menu.

Many ideas have been developed through HRSA technical assistance activities over the years as well as insights from SPNS projects. Techniques include outreach to get new clients in care, expansion of HIV testing as a portal to care, and service delivery innovations to engage and retain people in care (e.g., use of peers, motivational interviewing). Below are just a few highlights, selected from a much larger collection on the HIV Care Continuum topic page.

SPNS Innovations

Ryan White’s SPNS initiatives have come up with a number of tested and proven strategies for HIV/AIDS care, including replicable strategies for engaging people in care. See what’s available in the Integrating HIV Innovative Practices (IHIP) collection, featuring a:

Training Manual to assist providers adapt engagement in care models within their current operations.

Curriculum to educate staff and others on how to replicate these models. The curriculum can also be used as a tool for improving quality of activities to engage people in care.

Measuring and Improving Engagement in Care

In+care is a HRSA-sponsored quality improvement campaign to improve patient engagement and retention in HIV/AIDS care. In+care hosts webinars and a collection of tools, measures, and strategies for retaining people in care.

Consumers Link Other Consumers to Care

Project Consumer LINC (Linking Individuals into Needed Care) is comprised of models and strategies for Ryan White consumers to assist in linking other PLWHA into care.

This HRSA-funded technical assistance and training project, carried out in partnership with Mosaica, identified a mix of direct consumer-based strategies (e.g., outreach) as well as indirect strategies (e.g., consumer review of the system of care in order to remove access barriers).

Data on Engagement in Care. Multiple theories and studies have emerged over the past 5+ years on the benefits of engaging people in care and the challenges to doing so, like the Test and Treat theoretical model (tagged TLC+) that HIV/AIDS could be eliminated from society with full engagement in care.

Efficacy of Treatment as Prevention. The NIH-funded study HPTN 052 demonstrated the efficacy of treatment as a prevention tool.

Treatment Cascade. Data released in 2010 showed how far we had to go in getting infected individuals fully engaged in care. The treatment cascade is a visual model that runs parallel to HRSA’s continuum of care and illustrates the small proportion of individuals who have been tested, are in care, and have full viral suppression.